Tuesday, 22 January 2013

In Part 1 we took a look at the psychological and
intellectual gap between the make up of Congo the Chimpanzee and Mankind. In
this new letter I want to introduce you to some of the extra perceptual
abilities mankind has developed in the seven million years that have elapsed
since Chimpanzees and Humans last shared a common ancestor. This will lead us
to examine in future letters some new thinking about consciousness.

Memories of the Future

Imagine you are taking a walk with your partner on a
cold mid-February morning and you come across this beautiful sight amongst
the dead leaves on the forest floor

(photo : Google images)

You might say "Oh look, snowdrop buds"

And your companion might reply "Yes, lets come back
in a few days time to see them in flower". And then I imagine that you
might walk hand-in-hand enjoying the wonders of nature and sharing in the
anticipation of seeing the beautiful flowers when you return. I have made a
drawing of what I imagine you are both imagining you will see.

I hope we have all imagined the same thing: The buds have
shot up on long thin stalks before bowing their heads like swans do, and then
they unfurled their pure white petals to show the pretty white petticoats that
were hidden from view inside the closed buds. The leaves have grown long and
pointed. These images of the future are only possible because we have
stored memories of snowdrops that we have seen in the past, and from those
memories we can imagine what the two buds will look like when they come into
flower in a few days time. We use our memories to create images of the future.
This phenomenon has been studied and is called "memories of the
future". Whilst other animals may have this capacity, in the human brain it
has been developed into an ability that is far beyond the ability of other
species. Our human minds are exceptionally good at using past experience
to "visualize" what the future will look like. The point I am making is a
simple one; without memories it would be impossible to imagine the future,
and the visual world that exists in our heads is dependent on those stored
memories. It is a surprising fact that when old people lose their memories
of the past through Alzheimer's or dementia they also lose your their ability to
imagine how the future will look.

Our highly developed aptitude to make "Memories of the
Future" is one of the crowning glories of human consciousness. It
introduces the concept that objects in the outside world change in predictable
ways, for instance we can visualise that when meat is left in the sun it will go
rotten, and if it is moved to a cool place in the shade it will last longer.
A squirrel stores food too, but their behaviour is inherited through their
genes, they are not storing food because they have visual images of how they
might starve in the cold winter to come.

Images of
patterns (in the broadest sense of the word, including musical tunes, memories
of smells and subterranean visual images) that are the currency of the human
mind. But our unique abilities for visual gymnastics come at a high cost
because they are a brain-power hungry activity. It has been calculated that over
50% of our brain's capacity is used for visual tasks, and although it may seem
our brains are a relatively small part of our body weight (just 2%) they consume
20% of our daily energy requirements. Our expanded heads make
childbirth dangerous, our babies arrive in the world more helpless than other
animals and our children take decades to grow into adults.

(photo; Scientific American Website)

Evolution would not have invested such a high amount of
resources into big brains that take decades to develop if there was not a very
big payback for our species. One payback may be this ability to visualise how
objects change with time, because it gives us the knowledge to predict what will
happen in our world. Memoriesof the Future is at the root
of these predictive faculties which gives us foresight and choice to adapt our
behaviour to sudden environmental change. It contributes to making us the most
cunning species on the planet; able to plan and make choices, use objects to
make tools, and visualise strategies to overcome problems and outwit other
species that we want to
escape from or exploit for food.

Memories of the
Future has another unexpected virtue, it changes the way we see objects in the
world around us. To other animals objects must seem static in time, but for us
it is quite different because when we see things, even useless things, we see
the potential they hold. For instance when a dog looks at a strawberry flower
it thinks "This is not food, it is not dangerous, it is not a warm place to
sleep - it is useless and to be ignored" but we see the flower's potential
to bring us food. Dogs ignore the first green shoots that emerge through the
snow, they may are useless inedible things to us too, but they are symbolic of
the changing seasons and the coming Spring which will bring warmer weather and
new sources of food.

So when we see the plants responding to the
weather like this, we are aware that around us are other living entities that
share our wish to see the warmer weather. They seem to know the winter is over
before we do, as if they are the intelligent. So when we walk hand in hand
through the woods in Spring we are in contemplation of the changing of the
seasons, and we are in awe of the things around us which also seem to also be
contemplating Spring, we sense that they contain spirit like we do. Only our
species has this Godly vision of the world to which we belong, perhaps that is
why only our species worships God.

Another
interesting thought is that memories of the future gave us a reason to think
with symbols, which is the precursor to language. Did memories of the future
make us into symbol thinking animals that had the potential to go on to invent
language? Just a thought, I have never seen this idea suggested in
books!

Time Lines

Memories of the future introduced a new element into
our conscious thought, and a new mental ability that led to a new faculty of
mind that is not available to other species. This faculty might have been
the golden key that unlocked a treasure chest of new aptitudes that are the
hallmark of humanity; things like our "Ego and our Heightened sense of
Self", "Reason, Science and Deductive Thought",
"Religion and Beliefs", "Language with Grammar and
Syntax", "Culture, Imitation and Memes", "A
Sense of Good and Evil", "A Guilty Conscience" and
"Art and Creativity". The list can be endlessly extended and
subdivided, it could also include "Empathy and Compassion",
"Free Will", "Social Organisation" and
"Toolmaking". The golden faculty I am writing of is the mental
time-lines that memories of the future enables us to construct inside our
heads. Let me demonstrate what a mental time line is and why it is so special:

A seedling goes through a succession of stages before
fruiting. These successive stages are put in order on a timeline which has been
artificially constructed in our heads. To join up our thoughts onto a single
thread of time the mind had to adapt old cloth to serve new purposes; it taken
our ability to visualise space to create a completely new sort of visualisation;
visualization of time as a line in space. The way we talk about time is
saturated with spatial metaphors; the very word "line" is a spatial metaphor,
and we talk of time stretching out before us, things happening before and after
each other, and taking a short or long time. If you observe the timelines you
create in your head you will find you imagine the transformations happening in
virtual space created in your head;
;

Memories are not always put on the time line in the
same order that we experienced or learnt about them, the order is often
worked out in working
memory before being placed in the appropriate position on the virtual time
line in your head. It is very easy to demonstrate this happening:

Take the sentence "Today John drove to meet Emily
who had already gone to London by train to help her parents move into the flat
that they had bought in the previous Spring"

The order in which your mind was told the information:

1. (First we are told)John drove to
meet Emily

2. (Second we are told) Emily ...had already gone by
train to London.

3. (third we are told) parents and moving into the
new flat (which we presume is in London).

4. (Forth we are told) her Emily's parents
had bought a flat in the previous Spring

Our mind has to re-order the information before putting it
onto a virtual timeline and memorising it. To make a time line we have to use
another sort of memory called "working memory". The term working memory refers
to a brain function that provides temporary storage where information can
be manipulated for complex cognitive tasks such as language comprehension,
learning, and reasoning. The information held in the working memory is very
fragile and quickly forgotten, which happens if you become distracted, like when
someone interrupts you whilst you are trying to remember a telephone number.
(If you want to remember the number for the long term you have to go through a
procedure of rehearsing the information by repeating it to yourself several
times or writing it down. It can then be stored in your memory banks before you
think about something else).

The current model for working memory has three parts; A
phonological loop (dubbed: the inner voice and
ear) which remembers and organisms language, and visuo-spatial
sketchpad (dubbed: The inner eye) that manipulates visual
images, and central executive function that is an
attention-controlling system that combines the two. One way we use the working
memory is to analyse the order in which things happened and place the
information as a timeline on our visuospatial sketchpad . When we are satisfied
that we have worked out the meaning of a long sentence (full of clauses) it is
visualised as a single time line. Only after we have done this can we put the
new information into our long term memory.

Working memory can also retrieve information retained in the
long term memory, and combine it with new information that has just arrived.
For instance last year you may have seen the strawberries, but at that time you
had never seen the plant's white flowers. When you see the white flowers the
following year you can decide that the cycle goes white flowers followed by red
strawberry fruit. (Think of your knowledge of history, where you learn about the
Tudors and Romans before you learn about the Plantaginets, this does not stop
you finding a space on the virtual timeline for the Plantaginets which is
between the Romans and the Tudors)
:

Timelines are one useful format (amongst many) in which the
information is stored.

Now lets return to the sentence about Emily, John and her
parents flat which is no longer in your working memory. If it never got
further than your working memory you will need to read it again to find out what
order things happened. If it is on a timeline in your long term memory, you
will be able to visualise what happened by retrieving the timeline.

1. What happened first? -
Answer: Emily's parents bought a new flat

2. What happened second? -
Answer: Yesterday Emily went up to London

3. What happened third? -
Answer:Emily helped her parents move into the new
flat

4. What happened fourth? - Answer
The day after John drove up to London.

Having visulised the order in which events happened we are
able to commit the timeline into our long term memory. What do you do if you
are asked a few days later what happened? You visualise the time line you
stored in your long term memory. You do not repeat the sentences you originally
heard, instead you look at your virtual timeline and after seeing the order in
which things happened make up a sentence; maybe you would say: "Last
SpringEmily's parents bought a new flat. Emily went to London by
train to help them move their things in and a day later John drove up to join
them." When you began your sentence you would have a fuzzy idea of how
the sentence would end, this is because as you are speaking you are also
consulting the time line which has been retrieved into your working memory
from your long-term memory as you are constructing your sentence.

In my limited reading on the subject I have not come across
discussion on the relatedness of Memories of the Future and
MentalTime lines, but it seems to me that they
co-evolved.

Timelines are an essential element for nearly all the other
human faculties we value. Let me take my conjecture one step further:

Knowledge of One's own
Identity

We have one Timeline in our heads which is more
important than the others, it is the autobiographical record of
our own lives. The record is self knowledge that is collected from memories of
our lives as we remember them, it can also contain memories that we have been
told about. Individuals in our social group will share some of the main
events, but the detail will be personal to the individual.
.

Our autobiographical record will often start with memories of
things we cannot remember. In my case I was born on a farm near Whiteland in
1953, and this information has become deeply embedded on my autobiographical
record. In fact I cannot quite know if some of my earliest memories are really
memories at all or false memories implanted from stories I have been told by my
mother. In my diagram I have included stories about ancestors too, because they
are part of our history and identity. If I were black American I might include
records of the circumstances behind my family traveling from the African
continent to the New World, because this would be an important memory that still
affects how I behave towards the outside world.

Antonio Damasio, whose model of consciousness we will discuss
when we come to look at the structure of the brain, posits that the evolution of
an autobiographical record was the critical event that created a new level of
consciousness in our minds. He has put forward a theory that the creation of
an autobiographical record in the human mind gave us an internal knower of the
self. Previous to this event the conscious mind had almost no conscious sense
of self. All living things have a sense of self, but this sense of self is not
consciously known to them. Humanity has developed a self aware self that
can stand back from our emotional world, and is able to contest and argue
against what our emotional drives are telling us to do. The mind has a new
faculty, reason, which can choose to override the instructions that come
from out emotional drives and gut instincts.

Visualisation of Time gave us a view of how objects in the
world around us have a past and a future, and will change in predictable
ways (what I half jokingly call Godly vision), and it also gave us knowledge of
how we ourselves also change in the world, and how we have a past and a
future. It gave us an opportunity to have knowledge of our place in the
world. Afterwards we were able to control nature and know good and evil. Maybe
visulisation of time caused us to be most arrogant inhabitants in the Garden of
Eden, but we were not cursed.

The unexpected gifts of having higher levels of consciousness
enable us to love on a new level. Amongst the unexpected features of the
autobiographical timeline is our ability to choose to position our thoughts on
any point along our autobiographical record, and we can imagine ourselves back
to being a previous version of self in an earlier time; for instance you might
remember your days at university sitting in the Students Union bar with
friends. When you do this you then think your way back to being that previous
self with half-forgotten friends in that half-forgotten place. Like an actor
you can experience to be that person you were all those years ago, with
a virtual past that does not include all you know now, a virtual present that is
you as a still unmarried single person and a virtual future which does not
yet include knowledge of the partner you met some years later and married. It
is as if our mind can be reconstructed and moved about in time and space.

Knowledge of Others

Theory
of Mind

I mentioned that we have the ability to move our mindset back
in time, and re-imagine how we were experiencing the world when we were
younger. In my example I suggested thinking back to your student days, but this
is only a taster for something much more extraordinary; not only can we move
back and forward on our autobiographical timeline, we can also can move our
mindset on to other autobiographical time lines belonging to other people. Here
is an example of what I mean; suppose you are looking at another person and
imagining what is going on in their minds and how they are feeling, how do you
do that? Well you build up knowledge about what is going on inside their heads,
which could include a picture of their autobiographical records. Having
managed this you move your mindsets into their heads and imagine how they are
subjectively experiencing the world. For instance we might look at a friend who
is drinking too much after losing a girlfriend, and imagine how we would feel in
his situation. When we do this we are empathising with them. This ability
to work out what others are experiencing is called "Theory of Mind". It
is called theory of mind because it is exactly that, we build a theory of what
their subjective world looks like from inside their heads, which often starts
with constructing their time line in our heads and living it with them. ToM is
very useful because by understanding the mental outlook of another person we can
predict their behaviour, be more sensitive and build closer social bonds with
them. It also helps us predict, and outmaneuver the strategies of our enemies.

There are people who have poor Theory of Mind abilities which
is called mindblindness. These
people find it difficult to empathise and integrate socially with other people,
and mindblindness is thought to be a cause (maybe amongst others) of autism and
Aspergers. Mindblindness can be a permanent inability that is rooted in the
structure of the brain. The brutal conditions that Romanian orphanages have
provided clear evidence that the affects of abuse, lack of
affection and isolation during crucial times during early childhood have
irreversible affects on the physical development of the brain, and the
children's ability to relate socially with other people is permanently lost for
life. On the other end of the spectrum Empathy can also be
greatly enhanced through imitation and synchronising
your physical behaviour with friends and team mates. This is called mirroring;
smiling when they smile, sitting in the same way they are sitting. It has also
been shown that marching and walking in time with each other makes people bond
mentally, and young couples meet and fall in love with each other by going
dancing.
.

(photo: bodylanguagesuccess.com)

Theory of Mind in Infants

Theory of
Mind is a big subject in psychology and child development. Amongst the
questions asked is do infants have ToM and when does it develop. The conclusion
is that this ability begins to show itself between the ages of three and four,
prior to this age children have very little understanding or appreciation that
there are other minds seeing the world from other points of view. They also seem
to have an underdeveloped sense of self, for instance if you place a blob on the
forehead of a toddler and put them in front of a mirror they do not seem to
recognise that the blob is on their bodies. This test is passed by chimpanzees.

The tests
for ToM are quite complex, and usually involve testing whether the toddler
understands that another person can have different beliefs from themselves. A
simple example is the closed candy box which is full of pencils; when the child
is asked to guess what is in the box they reply "candy", then they are shown
that inside there is not candy, just pencils which they had not expected. Then
the box is closed and if they are asked again; what do you think is in the box
they will reply "pencils". At this point a third person enters the room and the
child is asked what she thinks the third person thinks is in the candy box? A
child under the age of four will nearly always say "pencils", but the toddler
who is older will say "candy". The older child has grasped that the third
person has their own beliefs which can include mistaken
beliefs.

ToM is a
very big asset in social groups because it allows members
to outwit other members of the group by leading them into making false
assumptions and having mistaken beliefs. Interestingly very small children are
very bad liars; they tell lies that are just obviously not going to deci eve,
like games of peek a boo where the child thinks if she cannot see you, you
cannot see her. After the age of four children will invent false stories to
evade punishment, very often blaming others for what they have done wrong. ToM
also helps adults predict the actions of others, whether it is being done in the
spirit of co-operation or competition.

Do Chimps have Theory of
Mind?

There are all sorts of studies that purport to show that
chimps have Theory of mind. The work of Byrn and Whitten in 1988 who observed
the behaviour of six chimps was amongst the earliest work to demonstrate clear
evidence of theory of mind in other animals. Amongst the group was a dominant
male called Rock and a timid female called Belle. The researcher had a routine
of taking the chimps out of their enclosure and burying food, whilst they did
this only Belle could see where the food was being hidden, if Rock was not
present Belle would lead all the other chimps to the food and they would all
share the goodies, but if Rock was there he would bite and bully Belle taking
all her food. So Belle began to devise strategies to deci eve Rock into
thinking she did not know where food was hidden.

At first she would go to where the food was buried and sit on
the spot until Rock was out of sight, then she would dig up the food. But Rock
got wind of this and as soon as Belle sat down Rock would run up and push her
off the food and eat it without sharing it with Belle. Belle then would go and
sit a little distance from where the food was hidden, but soon Rock worked that
out too and would dig all around where she sat. So Belle began to sit even
further away and wait for Rock to look in the other direction, and then she
would get the food. Rock worked that out too and began to pretend to look away
or wander off, and then bounce back. Belle then began to lead the group to a
completely wrong place and Rock would start digging, then she would amble off
to where the food really was hidden

The speed with which the two chimps worked out each other's
strategies convinced the observers that there was an intellectual arms race of
bluff and counter bluff, and theory of mind was involved.
.

More recently the extremely intelligent behaviour of a Bonobo
Chimp called Kanzi which has been
studied and written up by Dr Sue
Savage-Rumbaugh who has been nominated as one of the 100 most influential
people in the world for he work with Kanzi. But she is not without
controversies of her own. She claims this chimp has learnt to make flint tools,
use sign language and has theory of mind.

Sunday, 6 January 2013

In the 1950s a chimp called
Congo caused a sensation with his pictures.

(Image
Wikipedia)

(Image
Christies: Sold for £750 in 2009)

Congo wanted to paint
pictures that were be aesthetically pleasing - for instance it was
observed: "When a picture was taken away that he didn't
consider complete, Congo would reportedly begin to scream and "throw
fits".[1]
Also, if the ape considered one of his drawings to be finished, he would refuse
to continue painting even if someone tried to persuade him to do so"

But Congo's paintings, and the art
works of other animals, are always abstract. Humanity's works of art
are intellectually different from anything produced by other species
because they are about more than just aesthetics.
Human artists use patterns to represent objects that they see in
the outside world; these patterns can be abstract, but more often they
represent figurative landscapes, flowers, religious stories and
portraits of our friends. The audiences of the
artists recognise these patterns as if they represent reality. A portrait
like this one by Rubens is just one example of this uniquely human skill
of using patterns on paper to convey emotionally charged images from one
person to another.

(Portrait of
Isabella Brandt by Rubens; British Museum )

As mentioned in previous letters
these patterns do not need to be complex. The Smiley is an example of
a simple flat pattern that beams feelings of happiness into the minds
of people who look at it.

Why was Congo not a figurative artist?

This may be irrelevant to the
fundamental question about whether Congo was an artist, but I think it
needs to be asked because something strange is going on here. The
answer to this intriguing question may help us answer the further question
about whether Congo was an Artist (which is often hotly debated).
Understanding why he did not paint figuratively helps us get into his
brain and understand his mentality. For instance was it because he
cannot see illusions? I ask this question because when you look
at figurative art, like the portrait by Rubins, you are really looking at
a flat piece of paper with a pattern which the brain sees as a 3D face. The drawing
by Rubens, and the emoticon of the smiley, are both
illusions. Figurative artists like Rubens are experts at using
illusion to fool the brain, something Congo seems uninterested in
doing.

Fortunately this is a really
simple question to answer because there are plenty of examples
of animals being fooled by illusions. Here are
some examples;

I want you to imagine that
a bird sees a moth and is about to eat it, but at the last moment the
moth spreads its wings because it was suddenly disturbed, on
it's underwings are two large patterns that look like eyes

The bird
was looking for something to eat, and was attracted to the closed wings of the
moth, which through pattern recognition it thought was food.
Suddenly it was confronted with a new pattern, the pattern was the
flashing of large illusory "eyes" from the underwings of the
harmless moths. The brain of the bird changes from guessing the moth was
food to guessing the moth was an owl and flew away.

There are
plenty of examples of birds being fooled by patterns on insects: For instance
the Hairstreaks and Blues are two families of butterflies that have tails on
their back wings. They escape being eaten by hungry
birds because the birds are programmed to peck at what they think are
the head end of the butterflies. The birds pecking at what they
think are the heads and peck off the tails instead, and the wings
break but the butterflies escape. If you are familiar with these
pretty butterflies you will notice that many of them have V shaped cuts on
their hind wings where have been pecked by birds.

All
brains, even those of insects like the fruit fly, work on the same
principle; sensory information arrives in the brain from sensors on
the body (eyes, feelers, smell sensors). The information arrives along
nerves as electrical pulses which form maps or patterns on the
brain. These patterns are the currency of the brain. The brain
logs, stores and recognises patterns made from the sensory
information and tries to make sense of what it is receiving so that it
can then send out sensible instructions to the owner of the brain
about how to respond. Brains are very good guessing
machines, but they can be fooled into making bad guesses.

Evolution has created patterns on
the insects to create illusions that fool the brains of birds into making wrong
guesses.

Congo brain is a guessing
instrument like ours, and he sees illusions just like we do, but he does not
use illusions when he is painting. So we can move on to a second
question; did Congo not have the intellect to appreciate illusion? I
think he did, for instance my cats seem to enjoy collecting and carrying soft
toys that look like little animals.

It seems to me that my cat
appreciates that the furry toys we give him are a bit like real mice. I
think Congo was able to appreciate the illusion of reality, but he did not
have the desire to manipulate patterns to make "figurative
art". Why not? At this point I find myself pondering what
is it that makes humanity different from Congo? I think this thread of
thought has come to an dead end with a paradox: Both "dumb
Nature" and intellectual mankind have discovered how
to use illusory reality, which is separate from the reality of the
"real" world, but our most intelligent relatives do not seem to want
to do this.

To understand
the gap we have to look at the differences between human
consciousness and Chimpanzee consciousness to find for clues about why we
have this desire to create an illusory reality, but Chimps do not.

The First Figurative Art

The earliest evidence of
figurative art by mankind are found in the Chauvet Caves which are in
the Pyranees. These works, which were made 30-32,000 years
ago, cannot be called primitive. They seem to me to be made by
artists who know what they want to express and how to convey their thoughts
through pictures. Are they really representative of where human art
started from or are they the flowering of a long artistic tradition?
Whilst constructing this letter I discovered a 3D animation of a walk
through the caves of Laucaux, these paintings are nearly as old as the ones in
the Chauvet caves. I recommend that you watch this video because it
is a moving and humbling experience.

Our species had
already roamed the earth for 80,000 years before these cave paintings were
made, yet from this earlier period there is no evidence of
figurative art. This very abrupt appearance of figurative art begs
the question; was there a big bang cultural event that propelled us into
discovering figurative art, or did figurative art happen gradually,
like the development of stone tools? These are a good questions to
ask because the answer has a lot to do with how human consciousness developed
and still works. It might even help us define what art is and why we do
it.

The Last
Common Ancestor between Humans and Chimps lived about 7 million years ago,
during this relatively short evolutionary period an
incredible gulf has developed between the conscious minds of Humanity
and Chimps. In the later letters of this series (which are
mostly written) I am going to trace the fossil and archeological record for
evidence of how this divide between humanity and our nearest cousins the
Chimpanzees opened up . But before looking at that well
documented story I am going to lay out what we are discovering
about human consciousness; models of how it works and how it is
different from the consciousness of other animals that inhabit our
planet. I hope this will give us important clues about
why Human Art is so different from the Art of Congo, and why
figurative and landscape Art is present in almost every human culture
(even in Islamic
Art before they introduced taboos about depicting pictures of
people)? I will try to find clues that will give you
tentative answers to my questions.

About Me

In the 1970s I attended day classes in sculpture and drawing and realised I was
not very talented. In particular I had very poor conception of space. I
have been serious about improving my drawing for all of my adult life.

I have used unusual methods to overcome my weaknesses. One is to
always draw from moving figures, only rarely do I work from static
models. In the 1970 - 80s I spent many thousands of hours drawing dancers
rehearsing, the results were mostly bad drawings, but they were always moving
forward. This experience has been the bedrock on which I built my drawing technique

Since 1999 I have lived in Pembrokeshire. I still draw my wife, who is a
ballet dancer, when she rehearses. I also draw faces on television for
several hours every night. I love most to draw from life.

The other method to improve my drawing has been to learn about the mind. I read books about
neuroscience and the brain. This knowledge is really helpful to my
drawing, and enabled me to understand what I am trying to do. I am a slow
reader and read books only on this subject. (It is not that I dislike
novels or newspapers, it is that I do not have the time).

In my opinion drawing and Art generally, is about the sharing of spirit.
This concept of sharing is central to art, and central to humanity. My
view is that art is all around us, being done by everyone and can never be
owned. So if you like my drawings you are free to download and use
them. It is also why I do not sell or sign my drawings, because to my way
of thinking this would deface their purpose.